


crowd noise

by reminiscence



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V
Genre: Drabble, Drabble Collection, Gen, Poetry, ffn challenge: diversity writing challenge, ffn challenge: marathon competition/challenge, motive exploration, prose poetry, word count: under 1000 words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-24
Updated: 2017-03-24
Packaged: 2018-10-10 06:32:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10431216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reminiscence/pseuds/reminiscence
Summary: You live for the cheers. You live for the screams. Somewhere along the line, they became the same thing. Frowns are just smiles looked at from below after all.





	1. cheering

You glow amidst the cheers. They're your fireblood and the vodka down your throat and when they're quiet, you only think of how to get them loud again. Your dragon-eyes are sharp: you see when they cheer and when they don't and you tweak your show to match until it's entirely transformed and the cheers aren't cheers anymore. They're screams of terrors and though your eyes are still as sharp as they were, your ears are blocked. Cheers and screams sound the same: they're loud noises that stir your blood and make you roar and amidst their screams, you glow.


	2. dizziness

You crumble in the heat. You suffocate in the prison that rises up around you: the balloon that expands to crush you and they don’t understand. Nobody understands. When things heat up, they expand. You’ll be crushed. You’re crushed. You crumble: like a cookie that’s been clenched in a fist after setting you alight and throwing you into the hellfire and making you into the hellfire. You swoon and fall from the sun into pitch blackness and you drown there. They don’t match you, flame for flame, or douse you in water. They lock up you up until you suffocate.


	3. cause

You hadn’t wanted to burn the wall. You never did and yet you were painted the villain anyway because you’d been swept up in the cheers, in the screams, in the dizzying heat that melted your senses and your brain and weren’t you supposed to have a dragon’s heart and dragon eyes? They hazed over, with the chants of the crowd and you wonder if they’ve learnt now, that smiles and screams are two very different things and both are the master of your soul: the flames that set you alight. You were the effect of their cause. Still are.


	4. easy

It’s easy to make people scream. So much harder to make them smile and now you face me/I face you: mirrors of what we’d been, and what we could have been. You will make me scream/I will make you smile and we play by proxy because you’ve lost another battle and I’ve won and we’ll never be on equal grounds because screams birth fear and fear crushes you and I just can’t accept my agony. But that’s okay. You loved the cheers, once. I’ll bring you back to life with them; I’ll put a smile on your face – and theirs.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for
> 
> Marathon Competition/Challenge - starting point  
> Diversity Writing Challenge, a59 - drabble collection with drabbles under 200 words


End file.
